Love Fifteen Read online

  “We must be careful not to leave traces,” she said.

  “It won’t always be this easy. Someone’s usually going to be here.”

  “Then we’ll get more work done, shan’t we? I’m not taking your poor Dad’s money for nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  And afterwards there was time to wash and dress long before Kay arrived.

  Another time when they were alone, on the floor of his own room this time with a pillow on the carpet, he said: “D’you know, I reckon most of the bods at school are still tossing off. Old Charlton even likes dressing up in women’s clothes. He told us he wears his mum’s dresses and goes walking in the park.”

  “Poor boy.”

  Theo hoped at least to be the Porter in the 5th year’s production of Macbeth but wasn’t even an attendant non-speaking thane. They were all expected to see the performance so Hazel went with him to the university’s Victoria Rooms, the only local stage now that the Prep hall was gone and the Prince’s burnt-out. Charlton was so pretty in his lipstick and crown that Theo almost fancied him.

  “Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” this teacher’s pet recited, “That no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose…”

  Hines, Shaw and Lunceford were attentive in the front rows, Dolly Grey smiled with adoration while Sparrow nodded off.

  “Come to my woman’s breasts,” invited Charlton, putting his hands to his flat chest as directed, “and take my milk for gall …”

  In the interval, Theo was angry and tearful.

  Hazel said: “Come on, you know why you weren’t chosen and he was.”

  “Cos he lets old Dolly touch his tool?”

  “Cos you imitated the king at a concert. Didn’t you say the head got told by that officer and then gave you a ticking off? You must learn that being brightest or seeing clearest doesn’t mean they’ll let you show it. Unless you’re a favourite. Or belong to one of their cliques or clubs. Oxford or Cambridge, –”

  “Or the Masons, like my old man.”

  “As for that, what choice has the poor man got? All part of a caste system to keep power in the hands of those who’ve done nothing to earn it but stood up for some degenerate old king. They’ll let you join as long as you toe the line. The whole country’s run like that.”

  “The whole world probably. Except America.”

  “The New World’s still being sorted out. It’s closer to the savage state. To belong to their gangs you’d have to kill or be killed.”

  “Not fair, is it? And don’t say nothing’s fair in this world.”

  “We’ll make it fair. That’s what this war’s about, though they don’t know it yet. They’re in for a shock when it’s over.”

  *

  For two of the seven weeks’ school holiday, the family went to stay in South Wales, where Fred had made friends with the local branch manager of his firm. Their pre-war summer stays in Paignton or Weymouth were only memories now that the entire coast was a front-line ready for invasion, the beaches barbed wired, cliff-walks bristling with concrete pill-boxes. He and Kay remembered those childish treats by the smells and tastes of vanilla ice cream, salt water, candy-floss, onions and vinegar, by the cry of gulls and the lapping of summer seas, by a residue of sand when they ran out bathwater in their ‘private’ hotel.

  The remaining holiday was a chance for more tuition. Hazel’s elementary school had a month, as working-class children, it was assumed by the powers-that-be, wouldn’t know what to do with more leisure than that and would only get themselves into trouble. Whenever Fred asked Theo if he thought Mrs. Hampton was giving him his money’s-worth, Kay tried to make Theo look at her, both aware of his chronic tendency to blush. She’d nearly caught them one afternoon testing the strength of the indoor Morrison shelter, the steel box that doubled as a kitchen table. They managed to be back in their chairs when she came in but she can’t have failed to notice their flushed faces, short breath and disordered clothes. After that, Kay was far less scornful of him, even now and then showing some respect.

  His first fortnightly report of the autumn term answered his Dad’s question.

  “Top in English,” Theo read out.

  “Yes, but that’s no real surprise,” said Fred, at the wheel of the Morris, after picking his son up at the school gates to drive him home.

  “Twelfth in French –”

  “Your second-best subject –”

  “ – fifteenth in History, eighteenth in Maths –”

  “Oh, well done, boy! And Science twenty-first. That’s ten places up in both subjects.”

  “‘Yep, and about the best I can do. More than enough for a pass in School Cert. Credits in languages and history will get me a Matric.”

  “I suppose we have to thank Mrs. Hampton for this? How many times a week is she coming?”

  Fred rolled down the window to hand-signal a right turn at The Arches, then paused for an oncoming military convoy, and Theo was glad to look along Cheltenham Road without answering for a few seconds.

  “It’s not only her. I’m hard at it too.”

  “True. You’ve obviously made an effort. We must think of a reward.”

  Some time later, turning the bend to approach Villa Borghese, they saw two cars drawn up outside. A uniformed policeman stood at the gate and several neighbours had gathered to watch. Had Gran been taken ill? But there was no ambulance.

  Fred pulled up behind the other car, climbed out and asked an older man: “Hullo, Stanley, what’s all this?”

  They shook hands.

  “Your house, Fred?”

  “It is.”

  “I didn’t know. Our friends in H.M.Customs have had their eyes on this chap. They were put on to him by your neighbours.”

  “Which chap?”

  Two men in raincoats came from the house frog-marching Vince. The net curtains in the opposite bay fell back as Theo looked towards the Salvationists’ house.

  “What was he doing in my place?”

  The officer had opened the familiar cardboard suitcase resting on the waist-high wall of Villa Borghese, now stripped of its metal railings. He was studying Vince’s stock. He didn’t meet Fred’s eyes.

  “We have to assume it’s a halfway house shall-we-call-it… where he colludes with his confederates perhaps? Very likely transpire that your good lady and her mother were just being used. Innocent victims.”

  “D’you mean black market?”

  “Pull the other, the whole bloody family knows me,” Vince began to say but the constable shoved him forward.

  “Alright, that’s enough language, thank you. Let’s not play silly buggers, shall we?, Landing you in it even deeper.”

  Fred stared closely at his family’s retail supplier.

  “Never seen you before in my life.”

  But, come to think of it, he thought, the face wasn’t quite unfamiliar.

  As they opened the rear passenger door, Vince saw Theo still sitting in the front of Fred’s Morris. A slight smile crumpled his face even more and he gave a wink no-one else would have seen, before stooping to climb in, a constable’s hand on his head. Vince’s face looking from the car jogged Fred’s memory.

  Tilda had pulled aside the net and thrown up the sash window.

  “What do thee buggers want?” she shouted at the small crowd, “a saucer for thees eyes?”

  “That’s enough now, mother,” Fred told her and went inside. By the time Theo joined them in the living-room, Rose was sobbing, Fred taking off his coat and Kay looking on as avidly as the neighbours. Through the net-curtained window, they saw Vince being driven off. One of the officers dispersed the onlookers by telling them the show was over.

  “They bleedin’ gawpers with their h’eyes on stalks, they’m only jealous.”

  “I’ve told you before, mother,” Fred said, “that sort of language may do for Mina Road but up here …”

  “Mum,” Kay said, “the last I saw they were going to take you to the stat
ion too? So what happened?”

  Theo said “I saw Dad give that policeman the handshake.”

  “Not that I needed to,” Fred said, “so happens he was one of my sponsors for the lodge. So, you two, find some homework to do and, Tilda, make us a nice cup of tea.”

  As they shut the door behind them, he was asking Rose if that wasn’t the same chap that used to drive her to the troop shows.

  After that, Rose’s concert career (or comeback, as she sometimes called it) abruptly ended. There were no more requests for ‘Only a Rose’ or ‘My hero’. Vince’s arrest and conviction were reported in The Evening World but with no mention of the family.

  Fred’s hopes of help from the Brotherhood came good and his new itinerary gave him more weeks at home. It was, Theo said, a fair exchange for the risk of having his tongue cut out and left halfway to Lundy Island. Fred resumed a routine from their earlier years, taking Rose drinking and socialising, usually in The Shakespeare, a redbrick roadhouse beside Eastville Park, though during weeks when he was away (now only one in five), she still sampled Sidecars and Daquiris in the Morry, saying it was unpatriotic not to make our Canadian Cousins feel at home when they’d come so far to help the mother country.

  FOURTEEN

  In the low-lying area towards Bath, the Avon still ran beside the main line to London, sometimes veering off on natural detours but always rejoining the railway’s course like a wayward lover clinging to its more sober mate. Meandering across pastures prone to flooding by the western Avon, passing the corrugated-iron boatsheds of Saltford, it was led astray by the chocolate factory of Somerdale. At last, though, the river ran off at a steep angle to be lost in the city’s muddle of man-made waterways before seeping out to sea through the mudbanks of its famous gorge.

  From some Commie art-teacher, Hazel borrowed one of the narrowboats along the river bank near Hanham Weir. Theo worked hard pumping out the bilges and in later years remembered the weekend as a glimpse of Hazel’s Utopia. He would always be able to summon up the sounds of the whole barge creaking as the first sun melted Saturday night’s frost. Or of watching through a porthole how the motion of their ecstatic acrobatics made waves lap the bank. Reliance on Inky for an alibi meant his friend had to be told the partial truth, a risk Theo felt worth taking as the weather was perfect and breakfast of buttered toast and Maxwell House never tasted better before or since than on those bright cold mornings. The church bells of Keynsham village didn’t ring to remind them it was a wartime English Sunday, in fact. They didn’t chime again till late 1942 to celebrate El Alamein. This embryonic colony of quaint floating dwellings was among the first of a nationwide revival that saved the canals and opened the locks for sheer pleasure.

  *

  To reward him for his great improvement at school, Fred bought him a ciné camera. He knew which member of the brotherhood to approach for rare pre-war film-stock and made a formal presentation of both, with Hazel present, thanking her for bringing about such a change in his son’s class positions.

  Almost at once Theo began shooting a record of their private lessons… Hazel half-wrapped in Theo’s dressing-gown or against the net curtained windows of his parents’ bedroom… automatic delayed-release shots of them both, smiling in the double-bed or on the floor of his own room… During the house-boat weekend, he added Hazel naked in the bunk, covering herself with a blanket as he approached, closing on her pouting mouth and long tongue touching the end of her nose, her eyes crossed like Ben Turpin of the Keystone Kops.

  There was no chance of seeing even an inch of this footage at the time. Who could be trusted to process such an early example of the skin-flick? Once the whole length had been exposed, it remained in its can, an Index Expurgatorius waiting for his eyes only. It was to be decades before Hazel watched it, excited and appalled.

  His family was shown a very different film – of family scenes and general views, though you had to be careful when you tried to shoot even ordinary wartime scenes in case some Bloody Sergeant decided a milkman’s rounds could be of interest to German High Command. There were limits to Fred’s Masonic immunity. In fact, Fred reported that Hitler was as down on Masons as he was the Jews. So what emerged was an arty and ambitious family snapshot, with all its priceless information about how life really looked beyond the paper-strip windows, a more edible madeleine than Proust’s.

  “Isn’t it dangerous having that film around?” Hazel asked one afternoon as they sat doing simultaneous equations in the bay window of Villa Borghese.

  “Why?”

  “Well, your Dad knows which Brother can get it developed. So what if he found it and thought you must have forgotten it and got it processed without telling you, perhaps as another reward for being such a good boy… and you came home one night to find the front room all set up like the Odeon with your mum and sister and grandma, and you all had to sit there watching me in the altogether in their bed upstairs and –”

  “Mum and Harry in the taxi, yeah.”

  The very thought made his scrotum clench with fear.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “Dad might enjoy it. He keeps a nude photo from Men Only over his bed and came twice to see the snake-dancer.”

  She shook her head.

  “So,” he consented, “hadn’t you better keep it in your flat ?”

  “And if Geoff comes home on leave?”

  “We all believe in free love, don’t we? We could watch it together. If it was developed, which it isn’t.”

  “All three of us?”

  She stared at him for some time, so that he finally asked: “You don’t think he’d mind, do you?”

  “Wouldn’t you if you were in his place?”

  “Dunno. Not sure… No.”

  “I think you’ll find that’s unusual. Sometimes I wonder about you, really I do. You seem to have no possessive instinct.”

  “Isn’t that good… what we all want?”

  Hazel had no answer. This was taking common ownership too far.

  “Wouldn’t you be jealous at all?”

  He looked at her across the text and exercise books.

  She asked: “Does it never strike you your lack of jealousy is just lack of feeling? Some would say you’ve been set a bad example. Perhaps we don’t feel love for someone unless we’re given lessons.”

  “I’ve done alright for that,” he said with a smile.

  “I’m talking about love,” she said.

  “Free love, yeah.”

  “Love’s not only taking but giving too. Would you mind, say, if I was in a film like that with another man?”

  She could see him mentally lining up the shot. He answered by asking: “What about me with another woman?”

  “It would break my heart, “ she said.

  FIFTEEN

  When the real invasion came, no church-bells rang. They were supposed to be allies but few Englishmen saw the Americans like that.

  Villa Borghese’s wrought-iron front gate and railings had been taken, it was claimed, to make Spitfires, inspiring a dialogue where Theo, Inky and Jake as three F-for-Freddie types looked at the new fighter they’ve just been asked to fly.

  “What the deuce do they call this crate, Skipper?”

  “Odd sort of kite, eh Johnny?”

  “I’ll say. How in hell’s name are we supposed to get a dekko at Fritz through all these cast-iron railings?”

  “Haven’t a clue, Johnny.”

  “And do these eyes deceive me, sir, or is that rear-gun turret a galvanised bath?”

  “Old Togger’s not going to like it,” said Jake the Jew.

  Then Inky would brilliantly raise one eyebrow and look at Jake askance, letting the camera and audience know he thought Skipper had cracked with the strain of so many ops.

  “No, sir, don’t you remember, poor old Togger bought it last week. Pranged in the drink.”

  “So he did.” Solemn pause.” Jammy bugger, eh, Johnny? At least he didn’t have to fly this perishing contraption. What ar
e all these kettles for?”

  Fred foresaw a serious dogshit problem as the local hounds at last gained access to the tiny and now unfenced lawn in front of Villa Borghese. He thought for a while about trying to get the house exempted from railings requisition through the brotherhood but a friend advised him it could appear unpatriotic.

  Hazel volunteered for any service that would accept her. None would. Her pre-war record of I.L.P. week-end courses and summer schools made her a security risk so she became a warden. She passed on to Theo the rumour that the metal was useless as anything but railings and the whole business was only a stunt to boost morale. She said she’d believe anything of that Fascist Beaverbrook but didn’t care, because the unintentional side-effect was an early erosion of privilege, the padlocked residential squares of Clifton at last opened to the people. This turned out to be a false dawn. Once the G.I.s came and made the parks into outdoor petting parlours, littering the lawns with Frenchies, wooden fences had to be put up to replace the iron ones.

  But such setbacks never dampened her spirit for long and he loved her for this blind optimism. A battle lost, she’d say, but the war still being won. She quoted Oscar Wilde: a map that didn’t show Utopia wasn’t worth looking at.

  Theo passed this on to Jake while they were waiting for old Shaw to arrive for a period of geography. And brawn-and-no brain Coxie overheard. He was always borrowing ideas from others to make out he was as bright as them. So, as soon as Artie arrived, Cox put his hand up and asked to have the position of Utopia pointed out on the globe and Artie thought he was taking the piss and had one of his brilliant outbursts like a land-mine going off, throwing the stuff from his case all over the room – books and rulers, sandwiches and apples – while creeps and sissies ran to retrieve them and Artie finally found the detention card he was looking for, which would be no real punishment for Cox, only for whichever poor member of staff was on duty the day he was kept in.

  Everyone was scandalised when the orphans were evacuated and the first black Americans came to occupy their dormitories. One subjected class replacing another, Hazel said. Canadian cousin Harry, before being posted away for a training course, had warned them it would be the end of a real nice district. Tilda said again she was more scared of them blessed Doughboys than Hitler. Like any English husband and father, Fred had been concerned at the rumoured Yankee invasion, as he’d feared Americans would appeal to his wife even more than Canadians had. So it was a relief to him when the first contingent turned out to be negroes, as obviously even she would draw the line at them.